By contrast with Monday's richly confident "five things I've loved" about London 2012, here's an intermittently diffident quintet of broad objectives for that elusive concept known as "legacy." Let's dignify it as an early draft.

BBC 5 Live's Mark Chapman has more than once expressed his dislike for the "legacy" word these past few days, and if his reason is that its meaning is slippery to the point of treachery I sympathise. That said, we have been faithfully promised that good stuff will flow from that nine billion quid investment, and keep flowing for generations to come. What will the good stuff look like? How will it be supplied? Mostly importantly, who will gain?

Such questions are of great importance to residents of the Olympic host boroughs in particular, for London as a whole and for other cities too. The Games provide a massive test case for urban regeneration projects, which are often accused of doing less than they should for the neighbourhoods they change, and even of harming the communities there. Canary Wharf, easy to spot from the Olympic Park, is often condemned as an example of how to get regeneration wrong. So here's how the back of my envelope looks.

One: help local people secure the new jobs. Newham council is proud of its workplace scheme, which helps bring its residents and new employment opportunities together - over 10,000 since 2007, it says, and 5,000 this year, half of whom it defines as long-term unemployed. The borough's mayor Sir Robin Wales prizes his partnership with the Westfield mall, and there are more projects of various kinds in the pipeline. Hackney's mayor Jules Pipe is upbeat about the prospective tenant for the Olympic Park's two media buildings iCITY, which has indicated that it is keen to recruit locally. The objectives here seem sound. Success will be their being put into (continuing) effect. Also, there are four other host boroughs hoping for a employment legacy, but without flagship new employers within their boundaries. Their residents too must be helped to claim their legacy share.

Two: housing must be truly affordable. Sceptics hold it to be self-evident that regeneration leads to gentrification which leads to the economic expulsion of the very poorer residents regeneration was meant to help. It's not as simple as that: private landlords might hike their prices, forcing low income tenants to migrate, but social housing tenants aren't vulnerable in the same way; residents who've owned their own homes since the not so far off days when someone on an ordinary sort of London wage could get a mortgage might see a gentrification-driven rise in property prices as an opportunity to sell up and move to somewhere leafier, following a trail East Londoners have beaten for generations.

All that said, the host boroughs are as much in the grip of London's housing crisis as the rest of the capital. If regeneration deepens rather than alleviates it by making accommodation more expensive, the value of helping local people into jobs and improving their education will be diminished. If, for example, a young local person's wage from a Westfield or iCITY job isn't sufficient to cover this huge component of the cost of living, he or she may start looking for somewhere cheaper to live. The latest figures from the HomeLet Retail Index show that private rent levels in London as a whole have risen by 8.4% over the past year and in East London by a massive 13.3%.

Sir Robin Wales wants to reduce local population "churn," caused by people who've bettered themselves in Newham choosing to move to somewhere posher rather than stay. It would a sad thing if regeneration resulted in such people now wanting to stay but having to move anyway because they can't afford to stay put. There's only so much any local authority can do to hold local accommodation prices down, but government policy is hardly helping - it has slashed investment in affordable homes and created a grant mechanism which ensures that those that are built are less "affordable" than they might have been. Boris Johnson has not complained. After all, he supports government policy.

We see the effects of this in plans for housing in the post-Games Olympic Park itself. Fifty percent of what is currently the athletes' village will be in the "affordable" range - half intermediate, half for social rent - under arrangements made some time ago. But only 28% of the homes in Chobham Manor, which will be the first of the five new neighbourhoods that the London Legacy Development Corporation (LLDC) is responsible for delivering, will be affordable. The neighbourhood might include a community land trust, which would help, and the LLDC says it is "aiming for 35% affordable housing across the Park – in line with the [London] Mayor's London Plan." But how truly affordable will that 35% be? Wouldn't 50% be better? Is anyone powerful going to complain?

Three: transport infrastructure should be bold as well as big. Crossrail and Stratford International are the big strands of the regeneration transport plan, but what other threads should be woven in? Reviving plans for a Docklands Light Railway extension to Dagenham Dock would be good. River crossings for road transport in the Thames gateway excite great passions, with some being opposed to all and any, while others argue over the respective merits of the Silvertown tunnel Mayor Johnson favours and the Gateway bridge further east that he mothballed in 2008.

I can see the case for a new road transport crossing and lean towards a Gateway bridge, but also favour a different road management approach across London. We should use road pricing to reduce congestion and make the road network far more friendly for cyclists. Environmental and economic interests coincide here, but will the common ground be boldly built on? I know what you're thinking. Me too.

Four: a volunteer spirit that lasts. Boris Johnson has just appointed his old media chum Veronica Wadley for the role of (ahem) "Senior Adviser for Team London, Volunteering, Charities and Sponsorship." It's not the first time he's given her a helping hand into a jolly important position. Maybe he thinks he's still in her debt. Wadley edited the most hopeless incarnation of the Evening Standard ever, a spiteful Johnson fansheet for which her successor felt the need to apologise with a huge advertising campaign. This does not bode well.

Still, the generosity and warmth of the games-makers and ambassadors who so enriched London 2012 was not brought into existence by City Hall and can be spread and harnessed in many ways in the future. There's a role for the host boroughs here. Newham is proud to lay claim to the young woman with whom Usain Bolt was having such a nice chat in the Olympic stadium before being rudely interrupted by the 200 metres final. Perhaps a host borough volunteering summit could develop ways of working together to build on that success.

Five: a sporting legacy should embrace all. Iain Dale suggested to me during his LBC programme on Sunday that the Olympics host boroughs could collectively embrace sports as a specialism in their schools. I can see the attraction. But what should the objective be?

Politicians, especially Tories (no offence, Iain), have seized the opportunity presented by the Olympics to reprise their historic refrain about the character-building virtues of competitive team sports and how "political correctness" has "banned" it. Give me strength. Competitive sports, team and individual alike, are great for kids who love and excel at them as I did as a child, but guarantee pointless misery for those who don't. This does not build character, it damages it.

There is also a downside to revering sporting excellence in schools. Being good at, say, football can bring a boy such prestige that he regards everything else as secondary and those who lack his gifts as second class. Children like that don't require encouragement to take part in sport, they need lessons in perspective and humility. The guiding principles for school sport should be the same as for any other discipline - helping all children to do the best they possibly can and tailoring the most effective approach to each level and type of ability.

That requires flexibility and creativity, not some fatuous nostalgia for muscular Christianity. The goal for each child should be the same as for many of Briton's athletes at the Olympics. Not all can be medalists, as children who struggle sport lessons or any other type know only too well. But with the right help and guidance all can improve and go on improving their personal bests. A sporting culture of that type embedded in the East End would be a very fine legacy indeed.